As a general rule, I've found it real difficult to project MR production year-to-year. Scott Linebrink and Scott Shields are usually money, but most get so few appearances, that often vulture wins are as much about luck as talent. One guy I like is Mike Myers. He's usually just a get-a-lefty-out 1 or 2 batter appearance guy so he doesn't get the innings that most good MR guys get, but he's got great #s versus lefties, and he can rack up a lot of holds when the Yankees are on a roll where they're winning by just a few runs.

Other than the few constantly good MRs, I've found it's usually a wait and see affair because they come and go so much.

johnsamo wrote:As a general rule, I've found it real difficult to project MR production year-to-year. Scott Linebrink and Scott Shields are usually money, but most get so few appearances, that often vulture wins are as much about luck as talent. One guy I like is Mike Myers. He's usually just a get-a-lefty-out 1 or 2 batter appearance guy so he doesn't get the innings that most good MR guys get, but he's got great #s versus lefties, and he can rack up a lot of holds when the Yankees are on a roll where they're winning by just a few runs.

Other than the few constantly good MRs, I've found it's usually a wait and see affair because they come and go so much.

When I projected the wins totals for guys using this it was fairly close (within about 3-5% per year) on the overall total. Obviously individual outliers exist but I usually only had less than 10% of the MR's that were off by 3 or more wins. Most of them were within 1 win of being correct.

garf112 wrote:When it comes to batting average Ks and HRs have the same weight. A K is 0-1, and a HR is 1-1. Automatically.

So the idea is to find out how prone to BA variability a player is?Or just to find out how much better than the league average player he is regarding gb/ld/fb%. This seems like a circular arguement you are making.

On your first point a k and a hr don't automatically have the same effect on batting average. A strikeout is definitely an automatic 0-1...that part is correct. And a home run is a 1-1...also correct. But if a batter does not strike out there are two outcomes - a ball in play and a home run. On the home run outcomes the batter obviously hits 1.000. However a batter does not hit .000 on the balls in play...rather the average hitter hits about .300 on those balls in play. So while striking out gives a hitter an automatic decrease from their regular average to .000 getting a home run does not mean an increase from a .000 average to 1.000. It means that the batters is going from a league average of .300 on balls in play to a 1.000 on the home run.

The difference between a ball in play outcome (.300) and a strikeout (.000) is much different than the difference between a home run outcome (1.000) and a ball in play outcome (.300). Just as each hit is more significant to a player's average than each out, each home run is more significant to a player's average than each strikeout...at least as long as the player hits under .500 for the year.

On the second question the main thrust of the project would be to measure the variability of a player's batting average simply based on luck on balls in play. Finding out how much better or worse than average they are in using their balls not in play to support their average would just be a secondary part of the project.

pre-draft next year, do you plan on doing this stuff again?.... If so, I'd love to see it. Other than real basic stuff like Ks and walks per innings, I don't have the time to look deeper into MR stats. I generally grab Shield and or Linebrink early and focus more on hold guys over save guys, so your research could help a lot.

My league counts Wins, Ks, Saves, Holds, ERA and WHIP, and my usually strategy is, have dominant high K, low ERA and WHIP SPs (because they throw most of the innings) and on saves and Holds, I try to get one Ace in each category, but partially punt saves after that because there is typically a run on save guys and they get drafted way too early than they should because people panic, so I like to counter strategy and focus on hold guys who'll also get vulture wins and won't drag me down in ERA and whip....,

My pitching strategy is, excel or dominate in Wins, Ks, holds and ERA and WHIP, and stay out of the cellar in saves, since it's so hard to predict saves anyways with injuries and cold streaks, etc,. and since everyone else is focussed on saves more, it's hard to predict where you'll wind up ranking anyway even if you focus on saves in the draft. Plus, there are always save guys who emerge that nobody saw coming during the draft.

At worst, excelling in Holds and tanking saves evens out to a wash and I do great in the other categories, but generally, if you don't get the injury bug, I've found that one ace reliever and a 2nd tier guy along with a pickup here and there can keep you out of the cellar in saves.

johnsamo wrote:pre-draft next year, do you plan on doing this stuff again?.... If so, I'd love to see it. Other than real basic stuff like Ks and walks per innings, I don't have the time to look deeper into MR stats. I generally grab Shield and or Linebrink early and focus more on hold guys over save guys, so your research could help a lot.

My league counts Wins, Ks, Saves, Holds, ERA and WHIP, and my usually strategy is, have dominant high K, low ERA and WHIP SPs (because they throw most of the innings) and on saves and Holds, I try to get one Ace in each category, but partially punt saves after that because there is typically a run on save guys and they get drafted way too early than they should because people panic, so I like to counter strategy and focus on hold guys who'll also get vulture wins and won't drag me down in ERA and whip....,

My pitching strategy is, excel or dominate in Wins, Ks, holds and ERA and WHIP, and stay out of the cellar in saves, since it's so hard to predict saves anyways with injuries and cold streaks, etc,. and since everyone else is focussed on saves more, it's hard to predict where you'll wind up ranking anyway even if you focus on saves in the draft. Plus, there are always save guys who emerge that nobody saw coming during the draft.

At worst, excelling in Holds and tanking saves evens out to a wash and I do great in the other categories, but generally, if you don't get the injury bug, I've found that one ace reliever and a 2nd tier guy along with a pickup here and there can keep you out of the cellar in saves.

I'll definitely be doing some of this stuff next year. My plan now that I have quite a few new tools at my disposal is to take Rotowire's pre-season projections as my starting point. I don't have the experience or inside knowledge to predict playing time and they use Pecota for that. I also don't have a lot of experience with predicting the ebb and flow of guys k/hr/ab or k/bb/hr/ip component numbers based on where they are in the age/experience curve - something that Rotowire does a very good job of handling for me.

Once I have their numbers I'll project each team's expected scoring by taking the projected RC/27 outs for each hitter, dividing it by 9 and totaling it up. It's a bit of a rough approach but it's something I can bang out in an hour or so and should get me in the ballpark. I'll of course toss in DICE and pWhip into my pitcher projections to make sure Rotowire didn't do anything foolish with their ERA/WHIP projections. Then I'll toss in a formula to project decisions based on IP and role. I'll probably override the formula on a few pitchers but I'll try to stick close to the 10.099 number (or whatever it ends up being when I toss 2006's final stats into the analysis as well) for middle relievers. Finally I'll use a simple lookup to find out their team's run support and run the pythagorean expectation to give me that pitcher's expected winning percentage. I'll use those two numbers to project the wins (which along with the decisions I'll leave in fractional form) and then determine the IP / Win from there.

I'm not comfortable making all of this available on the boards here as Rotowire's projections aren't mine to publish. I would be happy though to post my IP / Win numbers based off of those projections once I have them available. It shouldn't take me more than a week or two after Rotowire's projections come out depending on how busy I am at that point.

Edit: One other thing I'll look at is the difference between my win projections and Rotowire's. While I can't post what Rotowire's projections were I can certainly let people know whether their projections for wins match up well with my own.

First the Projecting Wins and Projecting Whip articles have both been posted to the Cafe's articles section. Thanks to a reader's comment the whip projection formula has been tweaked which will allow for greater accuracy - especially when adjusting for different BABIP.

The million dollar question is which Soriano is the real one. I've laid out three scenarios here and given the rationale for each...my recommendation would be to read and consider each one and make your decision based on whichever rationale makes the most sense to you. Whatever you believe though Soriano certainly made his owners VERY happy for the first two months of the year. Hopefully you didn't see those numbers and trade for him after that big day on June 4th expecting more of the same.

garf112 wrote:Bravo! I don't own Soriano, and I wasn't going to trade for him, but that was such a good article that it just kept me reading.

Writing the article actually has me thinking of Soriano as a buy-low candidate as strange as that sounds. If you can play up his struggles since June 5th you can get yourself a 2b eligible guy that should be able to put up a minimum .269/32/107/76/42 pace for the remainder of the season. That's ridiculously good if you can get him for less than full value. I'm not sure how successful you could be at buying low on him right now but 20 games worth of terrible production can really start to erase that fast start in the minds of owners - especially owners in h2h leagues.

garf112 wrote:Bravo! I don't own Soriano, and I wasn't going to trade for him, but that was such a good article that it just kept me reading.

Writing the article actually has me thinking of Soriano as a buy-low candidate as strange as that sounds. If you can play up his struggles since June 5th you can get yourself a 2b eligible guy that should be able to put up a minimum .269/32/107/76/42 pace for the remainder of the season. That's ridiculously good if you can get him for less than full value. I'm not sure how successful you could be at buying low on him right now but 20 games worth of terrible production can really start to erase that fast start in the minds of owners - especially owners in h2h leagues.

The owner that I would be trading with would probably only deal him for my first born at this point, eventhough he would have taken MUCH less over the winter. The concerns were real about ballpark and lineup effects.

Yeah...it all depends on how savvy the person in question is...this is a time where the more savvy the person is the MORE likely you are to be able to buy low. Someone that's familiar with the ballpark and lineup concerns may sell low thinking 'at least I'm getting third round value before his numbers fall off too much' whereas someone that doesn't have a clue will just look at the overall numbers so far on the season and say 'I want Pujols + a throw-in for him - he's ranked higher than Pujols right now'.

I think there are probably quite a few owners out there that might sell him for 3rd round talent after this cold streak whereas those numbers look like at least 2nd round talent. The Nationals for whatever reason have been able to provide at least decent context numbers for Soriano and his ab/hr potential looks like it's going to be at or slightly above his 'good years' which makes him a 32 home run hitter even if RFK starts to drag him down.

It's useful from time to time to take a look at which pitchers have been unlucky. Sometimes the bloop hits fall in, the runners don't get stranded as often as they should or the hits all come in the same inning leading to a pounding. Identifying unlucky pitchers can present you with excellent buy-low candidates.